mapping online publics

The Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) is an important venue if you’re interested in, like the name indicates, Internet research. But it is also a good primary source if one wants to inquire into how and why people study the Internet, which aspects of it, etc. Conveniently for empirical researcher that I am, the AOIR has an archive of its mailing-list, which has about 22K mails posted by 3K addresses, enough for a little playing around with the lazy man’s tool, the algorithm. I have downloaded the data and I hope I can motivate some of my students to build something interesting with it, but I just had to put it into gephi right away. Some of the tools we’ll hopefully build will concentrate more on text mining but using an address as a node and a mail-reply relationship as a link, one can easily build a social graph.